Expert advice on creating engaging respondent experiences that produce more and better insights.

5 Questions You Need to Ask When Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Written January 19, 2017, by Stefan Debois

Did you know that, for every customer who bothers to make a complaint, about 26 others remain silent and take their business elsewhere?

It means you should think twice when you feel like you’re doing awesome with your customer service. In a data age, it’s data you need to base yourself on. The fastest and most trustworthy way to get there is by measuring customer satisfaction through short surveys.

In this post we’ll discuss the 5 main questions you should ask during one of those surveys, to get crystal clear insights. This is great for a first start, to create your benchmarks.

5 Types of Questions You Should Ask:

1. How would you rate your overall happiness with us?

This question is best to start with: It’s easy and it gives you a great first insight. Work with a 5-point rating scale for example. But you could even split it up into a yes/no question and then work with skip logic to add more elaborate insightful questions.It’s a great question to compare your company to industry benchmarks. The only downside is that you’ll have no direct actionable insights to work with.

2. How would you rate the following aspects of (your company name)?

(Excellent, Good, Average, Poor)This type of question is what we call “Attributions of quality”, it’ll allow you to measure satisfaction with specific aspects of your product, service or overall business based on a rating scale. A few general examples of factors that you could ask: Sales service, Customer support, Quality of product or service, Value for price, …

3. How likely are you to recommend (your company or product) to a friend, colleague or relative?

(Usually with a rating of 0 to 10)This well-known question is used for measuring your Net Promoter Score (NPS) and is the perfect satisfaction metric to track over longer periods of time. It correlates with customer actions and revenue and will help you identify your most loyal customers.

A quick reminder of how it works: Respondents who answer with 9 or 10 are your “promoters” and are happy to refer you to their peers. 7 to 8 are “passive happy customers”. People who answer with 6 or lower are your “detractors”.The actual NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the promotors.

4. Do you intend to return to (your company) within the next 30 days?

The intention of repurchase is pretty straight forward. The higher percentage of people likely buying at your company again, the higher the general satisfaction with your product or service. You could use a scale question for this one, that’ll give you a bit more detailed views instead of just yes/no.

If a respondent chooses a more negative answer on the scale, it’s wise to work with conditional branching and add an additional open text field where you ask them to elaborate on the reason for their decision.

5. Is there anything you wish to add?

The open-ended one… Perfect for the end of your survey. Most respondents won’t have much left to say, but for the ones who’d like to give you a more elaborate answer, it’s useful. And for you, it’s a bonus to get a few extra, often key insights.

And then one more that shouldn’t be forgotten!

Bonus: Demographic questions

If you haven’t had a chance to gather basic info about your respondents, it’s useful to add this into your survey. For example, at the end, it’s easy to finish your survey with and could be a required question for them to be able to receive the incentive.A few ideas of what to ask: Gender, Age or age group, Income, Location, …

This short checklist will get you a good set of first answers. Want to go even deeper into the art of measuring customer satisfaction? Take a look at this earlier blog post about the 10 metrics you should be measuring.

Make your survey playful and interactive

Extra Tips to Own Those Customer Satisfaction Surveys:

Keep the survey short and simple! Happy customers won’t take out a lot of time to fill in a long survey. People who have complaints can be contacted or, via skip logic, asked a few deeper questions.

Ask relevant questions only, people are flying through your survey as quick as they can for their chance at the incentive you’re offering. So make sure within the short amount of time, you ask well-chosen questions to get useful answers

We always like to know ‘more’, but force yourself to only as questions that relate directly to the experience they’ve had.

Always leave an open option – nothing more annoying than multiple choices where the answer your participant needs isn’t included. They’ll have to answer inaccurately, they’ll skip the question or – even worse – refrain from finishing the survey altogether! Always include the option of “other”, “not applicable” or even an open text field.

A small one, but one that can make all the difference: don’t make all of your questions mandatory. We’d love to have complete data with elaborate answers, but people have little time and get distracted. It’ll help you see respondents take your survey all the way to the end, instead of abandoning it.

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